IF OUR THOMAS JEFFERSON WAS A RELUCTANT RACIST,

ARE WE ALSO?

My remarks this morning are about us and racism.  This is a topic we don’t talk about very often, because we don’t see ourselves as having problems with race.  I would be willing to bet the farm that every person in the sanctuary this morning believes that racism is wrong, that each of us values racial equality, and that no man in the congregation is going to stand up during Discussion, take the mike and say, “Good morning, my name is Bubba and I’m a racist”!  So, we could, on the one hand, just agree that we’ve mastered our racial issues, skip the sermon, have coffee and go home satisfied.  On the other hand, we might also gain something by revisiting this important topic. 

By tradition, racism refers to the belief that one’s own race is inherently superior to another and has the right to rule over that other race.  I’m going to broaden that concept to include deliberate exclusion of members of other races from one’s own group, irrational fears of the other group and support of practices such as racial segregation and violence.

I’ll state my hope for this talk at the outset.  My agenda is to extend an opportunity for us become more aware of our own personal histories with race and racism, to become more cognizant of how our beliefs and attitudes about race came about, and how our personal experiences regarding race shape our behavior today.  I have brought the life and times of Thomas Jefferson into this discussion because he displays the kind of ambivalence toward non-Caucasians that in some ways may characterize our own orientation today.  Besides, Thomas Jefferson was a Unitarian, or so

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we claim.  And I want to introduce you to a contemporary of Jefferson’s who showed remarkable courage by actually freeing all 450 of his “owned persons” (slaves).

I said we each have a personal story of how our beliefs and attitudes toward other races were formed and evolved over our lifetimes.  Very briefly, I will tell you mine, especially in relation to African-Americans.  This is the Cliff Notes version, until we get to an incident in Gainesville, Florida, that taught me something about how unprepared I was to combat racism.

· Up to age ten, I lived in a small Ohio town with no minorities, we were all WASP’s.

· Family attitudes were not racist, but not overtly tolerant either.

· The family suddenly moved to a large city and I attended school for two years with many ethnic minorities, including African-Americans.  We got along reasonably well, but the area we lived in was poor and the school was substandard. I had no close friends with dark skin.

· We moved again to a suburb with an excellent high school.  This little city, however, was a classic “Sundown Town” (James Lowen, sociologist).  It deliberately excluded African-Americans from living within its borders.

· I attended a liberal arts college in Ohio that was mostly Caucasian; the result – a college graduate with liberal attitudes towards race, but still no meaningful contact with African Americans except for summer jobs where the main focus was earning next year’s tuition, not making friends.

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· Following college graduation I spent a semester at Cal Berkeley as a fellow student with, of course, many ethnic minority students, but my attention was focused exclusively on getting into graduate school and spending whatever spare time I had with my steady girl friend, Dalyte Ellis.

· Fast forward to the University of Florida, summer of 1957.  Now married,  my first year of graduate school successfully completed, with no summer funding, I worked for $1 and hour for the local Mayflower moving company, which employed local blacks, a few whites (and me) as furniture haulers.  I was enriched by the experience of knowing the local workers, and survived the dreadful heat and heavy lifting.

· One insight into black-white relations in the South at that time:  The black workers often borrowed money from the company against next week’s wages.  The company readily loaned the money but charged interest and kept the interest money in a separate account.  Then, toward the end of summer, the company used the interest money to pay for a large company picnic for all the African-American workers and their families – held, of  course, on a blacks-only beach! (This was 1957 Northern Florida.)

So now we come to the incident in Gainesville that I mentioned earlier.  It happened in the early 1960’s in a local drugstore.  You may remember that the first sit-in at a Woolworth’s drugstore occurred on February 1, 1960 in Greensboro, North Carolina.  Blacks were attempting to be served at white only lunch counters, usually not

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successfully, but the protest was repeated in other Southern communities.  Gainesville, however, saw almost no protest activity at that time.  I was shopping at a local drugstore one lazy Saturday morning when I unexpectedly came upon three young African-Americans quietly staging a sit-in at the lunch counter.  I say quietly because there were no press or media present, the protesters had no back-up supporters and, indeed, there was almost no one else in the store.  It was just the three of them, sitting side-by-side on the lunch counter stools, the young white waitress behind the counter in front of them, and me, off to the side.  The waitress was anxious and perplexed, but not hostile or aggressive.  The would-be customers were well dressed and groomed, and quiet spoken, as if to understate the act they were performing. 

As for me, my feet seemed rooted to the floor and my tongue seemed paralyzed.  I couldn’t hear the conversation they had, but after a few words, the waitress shrugged her shoulders (“I can’t do this.”) and before I could process what was happening and what I so much wanted to do about it, the three spoke a few words to each other, nodded, and got up and left the store.  What I wanted to do, of course, was to say to the waitress, “No, there is something you can do about this, it’s wrong to think that you can’t.  You can do the right thing and let them be ordinary people, treated respectfully.  The South is changing, so let’s let it change just a little bit, right here, right now.” I wanted to support these three young adults and the dignity and courage they were showing that morning.  The ideals were in my head, but the actions were not in my body.  Much to my regret, I missed the chance to be a tiny but active part of the Civil Rights Movement at that time. 

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Much later in my life, as I trained myself and others to be ready to react effectively to crisis and hostage situations, I realized the source of my failure in the drugstore in Gainesville that day.  I hadn’t practiced and rehearsed for situations like that.  I needed the experience of role-playing how to effectively encounter institutional racism. If I had experienced a similar situation during a training exercise, would I have been able to respond better that morning?  I don’t know for sure, but I would at least have been more “behaviorally primed”, so to speak.

So, the more we practice confronting and challenging racism – even in the little incidents that come up in our daily social intercourse – the better prepared we are for the big ones.  In addition to practice, however, there is another, perhaps more powerful influence and that is knowing and loving another person whose race is different from our own.  In this regard I was blessed to become close friends with Johnny Delgado. It was 1964.  The University of Florida was asked to sponsor two Peace Corps training projects and I was hired as part of the training and selection staff.  As a just-returned, very successful, volunteer from Peru, Johnny was asked by the Peace Corps to join us for the second project, whose volunteers were headed for Central America.  Johnny Delgado’s mother was West Indian, his father African American.  He had his mother’s joie de vie, he was bright and gregarious, and his humor was contagious.  He thought it was great fun to teach the trainees, mostly college graduates from very good schools, how to make primitive pit toilets.  He had grown up in the black community of Los Angeles.  As we worked together, ate together, drank beer together, and for almost a month lived as

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roommates during the overseas part of our training, Johnny taught me about the black culture he knew so intimately.

I learned about the food, hair straighteners, how blacks sometimes discriminated among themselves based on skin lightness or darkness, the racial threats he received because he was sharing living quarters with whites during the Peace Corps project, and the special black language of the streets.  He once said to me, “If you and I would happen to meet a Brother on the street, he could ask me about you, and I could tell him, ‘This white boy is all right, he’s okay’ and you would never even know what we were talking about!”  Johnny later married, lived in Hawaii and then California.  Our family visited him in Ventura a few years ago while he was battling cancer.  His widow later told me that at Johnny Delgado’s funeral, there were dozens of Peace Corps people in attendance to honor the memory of their friend.  Johnny taught me something about racism – that it could frighten him in spite of his great self-confidence and that a deep and lasting friendship is perhaps the best antidote to racial bias.

So, that’s part of my story on race.  Later, I helped with the preparations for the “desegregation” of the University of Florida’s Laboratory School.  (We used that euphemism to avoid the word “integration”.)    Still later, in  the Midwest, I worked closely with quite a number of African Americans in Indianapolis, had Ph.D. students at Purdue who were black, and so on, but what I have described earlier was the formative part of my values formation regarding race and racism.   So, now, let’s turn to “Our Jefferson”.

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Thomas Jefferson – was he a real Unitarian or not?  While he was not a member of any Unitarian Church, he was greatly influenced by Joseph Priestly, a scientist and Unitarian minister. While in the White House, Jefferson created what is now known as the Jefferson Bible, in which he literally cut out of the New Testament everything that he thought was not the direct word of Jesus. And UUs love to quote his 1822 prediction that “there is not a young man now living in the US who will not die a Unitarian”. 

            Jefferson opposed the suppression of ordinary people by the ruling class and he wrote against the practice of slavery. We are all familiar with the famous lines: “We hold these truths to be self-evident:  that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness…” (Declaration of Independence).  In his draft of that document, Jefferson also railed against the King of England for allowing the enslavement of “a distant people who never offended him [the King] captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation hither.”  This part of the Declaration was edited out of the final version by his peers, but the passage displays Jefferson’s ideals.   Jefferson also attempted on two occasions to have enacted into Virginia’s law code the prevention of further slave trade in Virginia.  All such attempts were narrowly defeated.

            In spite of his writings, Thomas Jefferson was not an integrationist.  He believed that the answer to ending slavery in America was to remove the black people, once freed, to another country. Indeed, he saw no future for a free black people in

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America. This theory of removal was extended by him to American Indians, as well.  (“Removal” was the term was used by William Clark uproot and displace the Osage

Indians from Missouri after Clark was appointed Governor of the territory.) 

Writes Thom Belote:  “Jefferson’s writings display deep reservations as well as moral anguish concerning Negro slavery; yet he never freed his own slaves.”  His family had slaves and he inherited many more when his wife’s father died.  One who came to Monticello in that inheritance was Sally Hemings, who was the light-skinned Negro half sister of his wife and twenty years younger than Jefferson.  You probably know the rest of that story.  He almost certainly had at least two children by Sally Hemings after his own wife died.  In his will, Jefferson freed two of Hemings’ sons and she gained her freedom not long afterwards.  Yet, for all his angst over the plight of African Americans, and his writings favoring manumission, Jefferson did not carry his ideals into action.

I consider Thomas Jefferson a reluctant racist because he could not match his behavior with his spoken convictions and ideals; his voice and his actions were out of sync.

Apologists for our third president have said that it was impossible in a practical sense for Virginia landowners such as Jefferson, Washington and Madison to accomplish manumission – that Virginia’s economics and social conditions wouldn’t allow it.  I disagree, and offer the case of one Robert Carter, a contemporary of the three presidents and probably richer than any two of them combined

Robert Carter was a very wealthy land owner from the Tidewater country of Virginia.  He owned thousands of acres, several plantations and over 400 slaves and servants, all inherited from his well known father.    Author Andrew Levy calls Robert

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Carter the “First Emancipator”.   Robert Carter was nearly unknown in our history until now.  He was a complex man who possessed great idealism, and yet had many strange habits and quirky ideas (sort of colonial UU?) who protected his slaves, insisted on keeping families together, and at the same time was anguishing over perpetuating the “peculiar institution”.  Finally he went through a lengthy legal process to free all 450 of his family’s slaves.  At one time, he too, like Jefferson was a reluctant racist, but he did something to correct the situation.  Thomas Jefferson did not.  My message this morning is that we too, being all too human just as Thomas Jefferson was a fallible human, may sometimes fail to match our actions with our ideals. That we have the ideals is the first step, but to put them to action is to confront and eventually conquer racism.

Don M. Hartsough

November 12, 2006